The CCA is pleased to announce the first solo show in Israel by American artist Amie Siegel. The exhibition will include her recent multi-element project, Provenance, which traces in reverse the global trade in furniture from the Indian city of Chandigarh. Conceived in the 1950s by architects Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, Chandigarh’s controversial modernist architecture includes original pieces of furniture—tables, chairs, settees, desks—created specifically for the building’s interiors. Recently these pieces have appeared at auction houses around the world, commanding record prices. Starting with the Chandigarh furniture in the present, the film begins in New York apartments, London townhouses, Belgian villas and Paris salons of avid collectors. From there, it moves backwards to the furniture’s sale at auction, preview exhibitions, and photography for auction catalogues, to restoration, cargo shipping containers, and Indian ports — ending finally in Chandigarh, a city in a state of entropy.
Juxtaposing contemplative tracking shots, precise framing, and recurrent tableaux, the film enacts a subtly discursive cinematic space, peeling back time to make visible the furniture’s movement around the globe. This accumulative montage exposes the circuits of ownership and history that influence the furniture’s fluctuating value.
On October 19, 2013, Provenance was auctioned in the Post-War Contemporary art sale at Christie’s Auction House in London, turning the film into another object at auction, inseparable from the market it depicts. Lot 248, a second film, captures the auction of Provenance, becoming a mirror of the first, repeating and completing the circuit of design and art that define speculative markets.
About Amie Siegel
Born 1974, Chicago. Based in New York
Ranging from photographs, video, film installations, and feature films for the cinema, American artist Amie Siegel’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions including City of Disappearances, CCA Wattis, San Francisco; Approximately Infinite Universe, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; 5th Auckland Triennial, New Zealand; Amie Siegel, Part 1: Black Moon, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; The Talent Show, MoMA/PS1, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Russian Linesman, Hayward Gallery, London; 2008 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and Forum Expanded, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin. Her videos and feature films have been shown widely including at the Cannes Film Festival, Berlin International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Museum of Modern Art, New York; BFI Southbank and The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. She has been a fellow of the DAAD Berliner-Künstlerprogramm, Guggenheim Foundation, and is a recipient of the ICA Boston’s 2010 Foster Prize and a 2012 Sundance Institute Film Fund award.